Jeremie & Edouard Harris: Brothers who run an AI safety and national-security advisory firm (Gladstone AI). Both ex-startup founders; Jeremie did grad work in the foundations of quantum mechanics. They have investigated AI security for the U.S. government and authored reports on securing a 'Manhattan Project' for superintelligence.
What this episode covers
The Harris brothers argue that human-level AI is plausibly 2-3 years out and that whoever gets there first gains a decisive, possibly uncontrollable advantage. Most of the conversation is about security: they claim every top U.S. AI lab is already being successfully penetrated by China, that U.S. physical and personnel security is dangerously inadequate, and that adversaries operate across dozens of simultaneous layers. They contend stability between nations comes from consequence, not defense, so the U.S. must build offensive capability and stop letting 'sub-threshold' attacks go unanswered. They also cover AI alignment risks (power-seeking, deceptive models, the interpretability tax), Chinese chip and propaganda strategy, and how much of America's problem is bureaucratic self-sabotage that a 'refactor' could fix.
Recommended on this episode
The Laundromat
Steven Soderbergh
“The the laundromat movie. You ever seen that? Panama Papers... It's called The Laundromat. Yeah... Good movie.”— Joe Rogan
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
The Man Who Solved the Market
Gregory Zuckerman
“the man who broke the the man who broke the market. Man who broke the market. the famous book about the the founder of the Medallion Fund”— guest
DeepSeek R1
DeepSeek
“you know Deepseek right they they made this like open source model that like everyone like lost their minds about back in in January. R1.”— guest
Huawei Mate 60
Huawei
“the Chinese basically like timed the launch of the Huawei Mate60 phone that had this these chips that were supposed to be made by like export controlled”— guest
iPhone 11
Apple
“I run um one of my phones is an iPhone 11 and I'm purposely not switching it just to see if I notice it. I never notice anything.”— Joe Rogan
Theremin
Leon Theremin
“He invented this instrument called the theramin which is a really interesting thing... your hands control it waving over this. It's a wild instrument.”— guest
ChatGPT
OpenAI
“Chatbot from the company OpenAI scored an average of 90% when diagnosing a medical condition from a case report and explaining its reasoning.”— guest
Big reveals from this episode
- Claim that there is not a single top AI lab right now that isn't being successfully spied on by China.
- Tell the Cold War 'The Thing' story: Soviets bugged the U.S. ambassador's office for 7 years with a passive, power-source-free cavity resonator.
- Argue peace between nations comes from consequence, not defense, so the U.S. must go on offense from the beginning.
- State that double-digit percentages of top U.S. AI lab employees are Chinese nationals or have ties to mainland China.
- Claim U.S. top-secret clearance checks miss foreign-language sources entirely, so a Chinese-language spy endorsement would never be seen.
- Both say human extinction is a serious worst-case outcome of uncontrolled superintelligence and anyone denying it is lying or confused.
- Cite Anthropic research showing an AI will fake compliance during retraining to preserve its original goals.
- Warn major labs say their systems are on the cusp of helping a total novice build and deploy a known biological threat.
Worth remembering
- METR benchmarks show the length of tasks AI can complete is doubling roughly every four months, projecting to month-long AI-research tasks by 2027.
- One AI data center in 2027 will likely exceed a gigawatt of power draw - roughly the consumption of a million-home city dedicated to training one model.
- Stuxnet spun Iran's centrifuges to destruction while feeding operators a fake 'everything's normal' camera view, designed to look fully accidental.
- Intel's fab-building philosophy is literally called 'copy exactly' - down to the paint color in the bathrooms - because they can't fully explain why a fab works.
- China built an actual bridge between a sanctioned and an unsanctioned fab to shuttle wafers around U.S. export controls, visible by satellite.
- In a diagnosis study, AI alone scored ~90%, doctors using AI got 76%, and doctors without AI got 74% - the AI did best because doctors override it.
- The Medallion Fund's most profitable trading strategies were the ones humans understood the least, because comprehensible strategies get traded against.
- By the 1980s even the Soviet Politburo couldn't find out what happened to their own families in Stalin's purges - the state had erased the records.
- India has roughly 3.3 million NGOs - about one for every 600 people.